The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 22

In a frenzy of denial, Nella brought her right hand up, curling her fingers into claws, and drove her nails deep into the flesh of her left forearm. She did not feel the bite of torn muscle; she felt the brittle, yielding resistance of dried parchment. She dragged her fingers down to her wrist, tearing the skin open to prove the blood was there, to force the red, mortal proof of her humanity into the light of Ronan’s lantern.

No blood fell. The skin of her forearm peeled back like wet birch bark stripped from a rotten log, curling away in dry, gray ribbons. Beneath the surface, there were no veins, no pulsing arteries, no pale wrist-bones. There was only an armature of tightly packed gray ash, bound together with glistening, sticky threads of dark pine resin that smelled of ancient smoke and ozone. From the tear in her wrist, a thin trickle of dry, calcified dust spilled out, falling between her knees onto the wet floorboards, where it dissolved into the mist without a sound.

Nella looked up at Ronan Blackwell, her porcelain eyes catching the dying yellow glow of his storm-lantern, her reed-choked throat working as she tried to pull human words from a chest made of petrified wood. But no words came. When she opened her mouth to scream for Rowan, for Delilah, for anyone who had ever loved her, the sound that tore from her hollow sternum was the long, mournful whistle of the Bleached Orchard—a dying wind blowing through an empty forest of ash, calling its borrowed clay home to settle the debt.

The dust did not rise like smoke, nor did it fall with the honest weight of dirt. It drifted, suspended in the dead air between her knees, a pale, calcified silt that hovered over the spilled basin before settling upon the puddle like grease over broth. Nella stared down at the rent in her forearm, her knuckles resting flat against the wet hemlock planks, waiting for the red rush of pain that ought to have doubled her over. There was only a cold, hollow scrape, like a dull blade dragged across dry bone. The edges of her parted skin remained curled and rigid, bleached white at the margins and flaking into powdery scales that shed with each shuddering tremor of her hands. Beneath the peeling rind, the dark sinews of resin gleamed like pitch in the lantern light, weaving tightly around bundles of compressed ash that shifted like fine sand whenever she tried to curl her fingers into a fist.

She clamped her uninjured hand over the wound, intending to stem the breach, but the pressure only forced a dry hiss of air and another ribbon of gray powder between her trembling thumbs. Her mind clawed backward, frantically reaching for something solid, some foundational stone of memory to contradict the gray truth spilling across the floor. She sought the memory of her seventh winter, the fever that Delilah had spoken of across twenty winters of porridge and mended skirts. She tried to feel the wet linen cloth upon her burning forehead, the bitter taste of boiled willow bark upon her tongue, the heavy, maternal weight of Delilah’s hand smoothing the hair from her brow while the hearth fire cracked. Yet under the weight of the Animis’s gaze, the memory shredded like damp parchment over coals. The smell of willow bark dissolved into the scent of cold lichen and resin; the memory of Delilah’s soft voice collapsed into the dry whistle of wind blowing through a dead ash grove. There had been no childhood fever, no little girl who had recovered by a miracle of prayer and elderberry syrup. There had only been an eight-year-old child who had slipped into the Bleached Orchard and never returned, and a shaped doll of ash and woven reed left behind upon the road to wear her name and quiet a mother’s shrieking grief.

"Look at me, Nella," Ronan Blackwell’s voice cut through the buzzing stillness of the room, harsh and rusted with terror. He had not lowered his storm-lantern, and the yellow flame within danced wildly behind soot-streaked glass as his hand shook against the brass bail. "You cannot sit there and let the silt pour out. If you open your chest to it now, you will drop to the floorboards like an emptied sack, and the debt will still be due. Look at the children. Look at what your barricade has done to the foundation."

Nella forced her chin upward, her neck making a faint, dry clicking sound like the hinges of a long-shuttered cupboard. The room around her had begun to deform in slow, violent increments. The stone hearth was weeping not soot, but a fine, crystalline frost that crackled as it climbed the chimney breast, snuffing out the embers with the quiet malice of a rising tide. Across the room, crouched against the woodbox, Finnian Hart had wrapped his slender arms around Brielle Foster, burying his face into the girl’s shoulder. Brielle did not cry; she did not have the air left for tears. The six-year-old sat limp, her small, thin legs stretched out across the rug, her skin shimmering with the brittle, vitreous gloss of fine tableware held before a flame. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, brittle stutters, and with every exhalation, a faint puff of white chalk drifted from her chapped lips, settling across the collar of her nightgown like pulverized bone.

The tall Animis stood behind them, its featureless porcelain head tilted toward the ceiling rafters, where the oak beams were slowly turning the color of bleached bone. It had withdrawn its hand from Nella’s face, yet where its cool fingers had brushed her cheek, her skin felt taut and dead, devoid of blood, like leather boiled in wax. The entity did not advance upon the children, nor did it offer violence; it merely existed as a leak in the world, an open valve through which the freezing, scentless void of the Orchard poured into the mortal air.

A sound rose from beneath the village—not the ringing of a bell, but a vast, grinding groan that resonated within Nella’s ribcage before it reached her ears. The floorboards pitched violently to the left, tossing the tipped washbasin against the hearthstone with a ringing clatter. The hemlock planks beneath the rug split with the c***k of a pistol shot, a jagged, dark fissure racing from the doorway straight toward the legs of Nella’s worktable. From the tear in the floor came no smell of loamy earth or stone; there was only the metallic, whistling draft of the In-Between, reeking of ozone, dry dust, and the absolute absence of heat.

"It has begun," Ronan rasped, lunging forward to brace himself against the doorframe as the entire cottage shivered upon its timber foundation. His boots slipped on the spilled water and ash, his knuckles whitening as he fought the sickening sway of the ground. "Do you understand now, girl? Do you see what your righteousness has bought us? The Orchard cannot fast. It is an empty stomach beneath the world, and if it is not fed the shallow warmth of their laughter, it caves in upon itself. It is dropping into the void, and it is dragging the cliffs of Somber Hollow down with it."

Nella tried to push herself up, but her left arm buckled, the wrist sliding through the puddle. The sensation was horrifyingly detached; she felt no weakness in muscle, because there was no muscle to tire, only an unnatural, mechanical stiffness where the resin had begun to set against the cold air. She dug her fingers into the floorboards, dragging herself upright by sheer, frantic will. Her right hand remained pressed to her wounded forearm, feeling the gritty drag of silt churning beneath her synthetic flesh. Inside her breast, the cold, hollow ache that had haunted her for twelve years had expanded, swelling into a vortex that seemed to draw the room’s air straight into the empty cavity behind her sternum.

Outside the cottage’s shaking windows, a terrible sound ripped through the night—a deafening, concussive c***k that echoed between the sheer cliff-walls cradling Somber Hollow. Nella stumbled toward the front casement, her boots leaving powdery, white smudges upon the wet floor. She reached the glass and stared out into the lane. The great weeping ash grove at the eastern boundary of the village was swaying violently, not from wind, but because the very shelf of limestone upon which it rested was tilting toward the gully. Above the canopy, where the suffocating darkness usually hung like a wool blanket, the sky had fractured. Thick, jagged fissures of blinding white static tore through the clouds, buzzing with the shrill, electrical hum of a dying sun. The black stone of the surrounding cliffs was crumbling in massive slabs, tumbling silently into the bottomless white mists that crept up from the ravines, swallowing the lower paths where the goat herds grazed.

From the dark cottages along the street, no lanterns flared. No frightened villagers rushed onto their porches with shovels and tallow tapers. The village of Somber Hollow lay locked in the dead, chemical paralysis of Sebastian Whitlock’s ghost-poppy draught. Nella could see Master Garrow’s chimney shedding slate tiles into the muddy street, could see the timber awning of Delilah’s bakery sagging under an unnatural accumulation of frost, while behind the shuttered windows, the adults slept their untroubled, bought sleep, smiling into their pillows while the earth dissolved beneath their beds.

"They will not wake," Ronan said from behind her, his voice flat with an awful, bitter resignation. He had moved to the hearth, his large, rough hands closing around the collars of Finnian’s and Brielle’s nightclothes, hauling the two children to their feet. "Sebastian brewed the draught strong tonight. He doubled the measure of black resin because he saw the trembling in the soil at dusk. They will sleep until the cliffs sheer away. They will sleep as their houses tumble into the chalk-meadows, and they will never know the difference between the dream and the abyss."